My second novel, The River Brings The Sea was published in December 2025. My debut, One Scheme of Happiness was published in 2020 by Retreat West Books. In August that year it was longlisted for Not The Booker Prize. I also write poetry and short stories.
Image from Amazon website. A typically edgy, unsettled atmosphere pervades the latest novel by Deborah Levy, published in May this year. Set during the Covid pandemic, a young woman with a hugely successful career as a concert pianist, has an onstage breakdown and loses her nerve. As a former child prodigy, she’s been taken away … More Review – August Blue
After 50 years, I’m back in Withernsea, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, fictionalised as Holdersea in my novel, One Scheme of Happiness. It’s so rooted in my imagination it’s been like going to Narnia. So much has stayed the same and is very familiar, but much has changed – in the 1960s the lighthouse … More Turn right at the lighthouse
27 February 2020 was the launch of my first novel. The whole process had taken years. But I had an agent and a publisher and life was rosy. And I had a lovely launch party at The English Rose Cafe in Victoria, London where friends, family and fellow writers came and my books sold out! … More Three years ago …
Kaki Okumu is a Japanese-American nutritional therapy practitioner. She writes on Japanese food, fitness, lifestyle and health. Wa – the art of balance is a self-help book that aims to answer the question: How can we live healthfully? With a background of growing up across two cultures, she challenges the mindset that sees health as … More Review: WA – The art of balance
Well, I’d finished the latest draft of my novel Jacob’s Ladder, and was feeling rather smug, ready to relax and access some culture, be more sociable, do some serious gardening or just rest. But something made me think: What happened to that scene where they come back and he’s thrown all her letters away? A … More Discovery!
A new Anne Tyler is always something I look forward to. Such a consistently good author, even into her late seventies and eighties. She writes with clarity, humour and wisdom about early family relationships that form individual experiences. The image of the French braid illustrates how our lives are plaited together with our families. You … More French Braid
by Ted Hughes This house has been far out at sea all night,The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,Winds stampeding the fields under the windowFloundering black astride and blinding wet Till day rose; then under an orange skyThe hills had new places, and wind wieldedBlade-light, luminous black and emerald,Flexing like the lens of a … More Wind
Some of the books I’ve been reading this year so far. Quite a mixture. Bernadine Evaristo to inspire me as a writer. Marian Keyes to make me laugh and to show me how to manage a complicated interlinked set of family characters. Matt Haig to offer comfort – it really does work, especially at those … More Reading & Writing
Last week I said I was going to print off my novel, Jacob’s Ladder, read it and start editing. My son had given me a printer they didn’t need and his girlfriend gave me a load of paper that was going to be recycled. The meeting of perfect circumstances? Well, at first all went well … More Printing my novel?
A quick update… I can’t believe I actually finished redrafting my second novel, Jacob’s Ladder in March 2017. Five years ago. And it’s still sitting waiting patiently to go out into the world. But of course since then I’ve finished a third novel: The River Brings The Sea and in 2020 published my debut, One … More Let’s start again
Ali Thurm 